Rashomon

If men lie in this world, what makes you so sure they'll be honest in the next?

Rashomon is a 1950Jidaigeki film in which a heinous crime and its aftermath are recalled from differing points of view. The film has an unusual narrative structure that reflects the impossibility of obtaining the truth about an event when there are conflicting eyewitness accounts. In English and other languages, Rashomon has become a byword for any situation in which the truth of an event is difficult to verify due to the conflicting accounts of different witnesses.

I like silent pictures and I always have. They are often so much more beautiful than sound pictures are. Perhaps they had to be. At any rate I wanted to restore some of this beauty. I thought of it, I remember in this way: one of techniques of modern art is simplification, and that I must therefore simplify this film.

Akira Kurosawa, on the style of the film, as quoted in The Films of Akira Kurosawa (1998) by Donald Richie. p. 79

Human beings are unable to be honest with themselves about themselves. They cannot talk about themselves without embellishing. This script portrays such human beings — the kind who cannot survive without lies to make them feel they are better people than they really are. It even shows this sinful need for flatteringfalsehood going beyond the grave — even the character who dies cannot give up his lies when he speaks to the living through a medium. Egoism is a sin the human being carries with him from birth; it is the most difficult to redeem. This film is like a strange picture scroll that is unrolled and displayed by the ego. You say that you can’t understand this script at all, but that is because the humanheart itself is impossible to understand. If you focus on the impossibility of truly understanding human psychology and read the script one more time, I think you will grasp the point of it.